Star-cross’d lovers that you can’t take your eyes off
Romeo and Juliet Sadler’s Wells Theatre
The balcony scene was marvellous for its combination of technical rigour and emotional generosity
Classical ballet – even of the earthier, 20th-century kind – can struggle at Sadler’s Wells. The stage isn’t quite big enough to allow some of the larger ensembles and longer stories to breathe, there’s no proscenium arch to provide an elegant frame for the action, and the stark modernity of the auditorium is often at odds with the necessarily period stage design.
Yet, given the right performance of the right production, such cares can melt away, as they swiftly did during the first night of the Birmingham Royal Ballet (BRB) revival of Romeo
and Juliet. First staged in 1992, this is essentially the Royal Ballet’s famous Kenneth Macmillan production from 1965 (a battering ram to the emotions when done properly), though there is one fundamental difference. Where the original’s designs are by Nicholas Georgiadis, BRB’S are by Paul Andrews. And, although the overall effect here is less monumental and awe-inspiring, it is also more like watching a Raphael canvas or Veronese fresco come to life.
If I’ve a gripe about BRB’S latest revival, it’s an occasional shortage of venom. Rory Mackay, as Tybalt, seems too willing here to rely on his (undeniably forceful) stage presence – too often he feels more passively disgruntled uncle than impulsively belligerent, murderously protective cousin. Similarly, Feargus Campbell’s handsome Paris needs to find more entitled, crushed-ego rage when spurned by Momoko Hirata’s Juliet, and, during the sword-fights, I found myself yearning for the terrifying strength and aggression that the mighty Carlos Acosta, foil in hand, used to summon in the same story on the Covent Garden stage. While I’m carping, although the Royal Ballet Sinfonia under Paul Murphy delivered Prokofiev’s work-of-art score with power, the brass were distractingly unreliable in the upper registers; very unusual for this band.
However, the star-cross’d lovers were of such complete, mutually besotted loveliness that everything slotted into place around them. The gossamer-light Hirata etched Juliet’s progression from carefree girl to smitten, scheming, desperate woman very credibly, while César Morales’s Romeo – amiably cocky, hopelessly smitten, hell-bent on revenge – was one of the finest I have seen.
After a subtly but powerfully played first encounter at the ball came a balcony scene that was marvellous for its combination of technical rigour and emotional generosity. Romeo’s love-struck sequences of turns and jumps in his “variation” are among the most devilishly difficult in Macmillan’s canon. Yet Morales found the height and princely mid-air angles (with his lower-body, especially), while, like Hirata, making it all look completely involuntary. The impression, in exactly the right way, was one of dancing before thinking, of two enraptured and entwined young lovers for whom the rest of the world had suddenly ceased to exist.
In fact, Morales created such a vivid and detailed young Montague in Acts I and II – constantly hustling both story and character forward – that I feared he might steal Juliet’s thunder (and in Macmillan’s telling, this is very much her story). But Hirata rose impeccably to the challenge of Act III, by turns icy, haunted, and finally stricken.
Also superb was Tzu-chao Chou’s intensely sympathetic firecracker of a Mercutio, up to and including his appallingly moving death, while Brandon Lawrence’s lofty but nimble Benvolio completed the likeable Montague coterie. They were a tight and boisterous unit in the challenging pre-ball masked trio in Act I, and later had great fun with the mischief of the letter-grabbing scene. At the end of Act II, Yijing Zhang turned Lady Capulet’s mourning of Tybalt – the choreographic nadir of the entire ballet – into a mesmerising vignette.
Also in Act II, Céline Gittens made her Harlot so lively, giving and drop-dead delectable that she became – in Romeo’s rejection of her – unusually potent evidence of his new infatuation, while the corps were physically sharp and dramatically on-the-ball throughout. All in all, a sterling effort by a company very much in command of its material, and a luxurious, intensely stirring evening’s entertainment.